When the operators tried to force union-breaking contracts down the miners' throats in 1977 and earlier this year, they ran up against 160,000 coal miners who will not work without a contract and who will not vote for a contract if they think they can get a better one….

The miners are now subjected to the dismantling of safety protection and black lung benefits by the Reagan administration and congress. The coal companies are on a new drive to open nonunion mines right in the strongest union areas.

When the black lung cuts were first announced, the union organized a two-day mine shutdown and 8,000 miners marched on Washington last March.  
 
November 12, 1956
Nov. 7—“Eisenhower's landslide victory is conclusive proof that the heads of the union movement in America have led labor into a political blind alley," today declared Farrell Dobbs, Socialist Workers Party candidate for President. "All the toil and treasure that the union movement poured into the Democratic Party campaign, at the behest of the labor bureaucrats, is now shown to have been wasted," said Dobbs. "Not only did the labor vote fail to defeat Eisenhower and the Cadillac cabinet, but where it did succeed—in the Congressional elections—the net result is to put control of Congress into the hands of dyed-in-the-wool labor haters and white supremacists—the Southern Bourbons.

"Had the same amount of energy and money been put into the building and running of a Labor Party in this election," Dobbs pointed out "even in defeat there would be something to show for it. Union men and women would have the basic structure of a party belonging to them."  
 
November 14, 1931
The long-expected wave of wage-cuts broke in the first week of October, initiated by the Steel Corporation and quickly followed by Bethlehem the Aluminum Co., Allied Chemical, etc. Capitalism serves notice on the worker that it can no longer maintain the "American standard of living." In previous crises, too, wages have been cut, but they have sooner or later recovered, as American capitalism has increased its productivity to new high levels. Unless American capitalism can turn the trick again, this time wages will not come back.

American capitalism needs low wages, first to meet the aggravated competition of England and Germany, second, to enable it to create new fixed capital at low costs based on low wages plus low raw material cost…

The maintenance of wages, "agreed to" by the railroads at Mr. Hoover’s 1929 conferences, is a pleasant illusion shipwrecked on the rocks of reality.  
 
 
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